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Microsoft opens Messenger up to XMPP

Microsoft has announced that its Messenger instant messaging system will now accept connections over the XMPP protocol. The company had announced it was opening up Messenger to XMPP at the BUILD conference in September and had previously offered a developer preview. XMPP is an open standard for exchanging messages, originally known as the Jabber protocol. Microsoft is following in the footsteps of Google's Talk and Facebook's Chat services which both support XMPP.

Microsoft is supporting the core protocol (RFC6120), instant messaging and presence (RFC6121) and XMPP Standard extensions for vCards, chat state notifications and delayed delivery. Microsoft has, though, also implemented a custom OAuth2 authentication scheme which means that developers will have to add support for that authentication mechanism and obtain an application ID and secret. That requirement also stops existing XMPP clients from connecting to the Microsoft service without modifications. Microsoft has published a "Getting started" guide and code samples for developers on the Windows Live MSDN site.